disclaimer: I am not too well-versed on the philosophy here so I could be saying dumb things, feel free to correct:
From my computational physics experience I know that it is physically impossible to simulate the exact electrical properties of a system of a couple hundred atoms on a classical digital computer, due to a blowup in computational complexity.
The laws of physics could be described as an algorithm, but the algorithm in question is on a level of complexity that is impossible for digital simulations to match. I think it’s generally agreed that some degree of complexity is required for consciousness: it doesn’t seem insane to say that that complexity might lie past what is digitally simulatable in practice.
The question of digital consciousness seems to depend on whether simulated abstracted approximations to the physical process of thinking are close enough to produce the same effect.
Asking whether a process is “close enough [to the brain] to produce the same effect” implicitly begs the question—i.e. assumes consciousness is biological.
P-zombies who wouldn’t describe their sensations in terms like “qualia” would likely have an evolutionary fit that’s equal to humans. I don’t know if they’re possible, but I think it demonstrates evolution wasn’t optimizing for consciousness. Therefore, we shouldn’t ask “is such system sufficiently close to the brain” but “is it sufficiently close to the processes that happen to make brain (phenomenally) conscious”.
In general, there isn’t agreement about any correlate of consciousness within philosophy of mind—there are well regarded thinkers who claim it’s not real (Frankish) or that it’s the basic substance of the universe (Goff). I think it’s possible consciousness is similar to, say, intelligence or humor, which means you need a complex system to meaningfully implement it. However, I think it’s unlikely that “complexity itself” is what gives rise to consciousness, e.g. sunspots are very complex (~unpredictable interaction of many elements).
To be clear, I wasn’t saying that complexity itself was the cause of consciousness, just that some level of algorithmic complexity may be a requirement for consciousness. This seems like a common position: the prospect of present or future LLM sentience is a subject of debate, but it’s rare to see a similar debate about the sentience of a pocket calculator.
A brain and a digital simulation have some similarities, but they also have a lot of differences. One of those differences is that the brains are running on “laws of physics” algorithms that are overwhelmingly faster and more complex than that of digital simulations. They didn’t need to evolve these “algorithms”: it’s inherent to any biological process. Seth identifies several other differences as well: continuous operation, embodiment, etc. His position seems to be that at least one of these differences may result in a lack of consciousness.
I only know I am conscious right now (and I am very confident I was conscious moments ago). So I think a system which is more similar to me at a fundamental physical level should have a higher chance of being conscious. I have no idea about what this implies in terms of concrete probabilities of consciousness. As far as I can tell, the available evidence is compatible with frontier large language models (LLMs) having a probability of consciousness of 10^-6, but also 99.999 %.
As a side note, I would take for granted that all animals and digital systems are sentient, and focus on assessing the distribution of the intensity of subjective experiences. I think asking about the probability of sentience of an animal or digital system shares some of the issues of asking about the probability that an object is hot. People have different concepts about what “hot” means, and they do not depend just on temperature (for example, the minimum temperature for hot wood is higher than the minimum temperature for hot metal because this transfers heat more efficiently). I understand sentience as having subjective experiences whose intensity is not exactly 0. However, I suspect some people understand it as having subjective experiences which are sufficiently intense. Different bars for this will lead to different probabilities. Asking about the distribution of the intensity of subjective experiences mitigates this. For example, one could ask about the probability of the mean intensity of what an LLM experienced writing a message exceeding the mean intensity of human experiences. It still seems super hard to get numbers for this, but what they refer to may be more concrete than a vague concept like sentience.
I do not see how philosophical zombies (p-zombies) could be physically possible. If they were just like humans at a fundamental physical level, they would in fact be humans. So they would be as conscious as humans, which I assume are conscious (because I am a conscious human right now, and other humans do not seem relevantly different).
I endorse the temperature approach. I’m not sure illusionists would accept the question “What’s the % probability that an entity is conscious?” as meaningful but maybe a similar question could indeed be universally accepted, like “Compared to your pain intensity 1 (being poked by a needle), what’s your central estimate for the intensity of suffering experienced in scenario X?”
Just to clarify, my argument didn’t concern classical p-zombies but what I call “honest p-zombies”—intelligent humanoid entities capable of metacognition but without any intuition similar to our phenomenal intuitions.
From my computational physics experience I know that it is physically impossible to simulate the exact electrical properties of a system of a couple hundred atoms on a classical digital computer, due to a blowup in computational complexity.
disclaimer: I am not too well-versed on the philosophy here so I could be saying dumb things, feel free to correct:
From my computational physics experience I know that it is physically impossible to simulate the exact electrical properties of a system of a couple hundred atoms on a classical digital computer, due to a blowup in computational complexity.
The laws of physics could be described as an algorithm, but the algorithm in question is on a level of complexity that is impossible for digital simulations to match. I think it’s generally agreed that some degree of complexity is required for consciousness: it doesn’t seem insane to say that that complexity might lie past what is digitally simulatable in practice.
The question of digital consciousness seems to depend on whether simulated abstracted approximations to the physical process of thinking are close enough to produce the same effect.
Asking whether a process is “close enough [to the brain] to produce the same effect” implicitly begs the question—i.e. assumes consciousness is biological.
P-zombies who wouldn’t describe their sensations in terms like “qualia” would likely have an evolutionary fit that’s equal to humans. I don’t know if they’re possible, but I think it demonstrates evolution wasn’t optimizing for consciousness. Therefore, we shouldn’t ask “is such system sufficiently close to the brain” but “is it sufficiently close to the processes that happen to make brain (phenomenally) conscious”.
In general, there isn’t agreement about any correlate of consciousness within philosophy of mind—there are well regarded thinkers who claim it’s not real (Frankish) or that it’s the basic substance of the universe (Goff). I think it’s possible consciousness is similar to, say, intelligence or humor, which means you need a complex system to meaningfully implement it. However, I think it’s unlikely that “complexity itself” is what gives rise to consciousness, e.g. sunspots are very complex (~unpredictable interaction of many elements).
To be clear, I wasn’t saying that complexity itself was the cause of consciousness, just that some level of algorithmic complexity may be a requirement for consciousness. This seems like a common position: the prospect of present or future LLM sentience is a subject of debate, but it’s rare to see a similar debate about the sentience of a pocket calculator.
A brain and a digital simulation have some similarities, but they also have a lot of differences. One of those differences is that the brains are running on “laws of physics” algorithms that are overwhelmingly faster and more complex than that of digital simulations. They didn’t need to evolve these “algorithms”: it’s inherent to any biological process. Seth identifies several other differences as well: continuous operation, embodiment, etc. His position seems to be that at least one of these differences may result in a lack of consciousness.
Hi Daniel and titotal. Thanks for the discussion.
I only know I am conscious right now (and I am very confident I was conscious moments ago). So I think a system which is more similar to me at a fundamental physical level should have a higher chance of being conscious. I have no idea about what this implies in terms of concrete probabilities of consciousness. As far as I can tell, the available evidence is compatible with frontier large language models (LLMs) having a probability of consciousness of 10^-6, but also 99.999 %.
As a side note, I would take for granted that all animals and digital systems are sentient, and focus on assessing the distribution of the intensity of subjective experiences. I think asking about the probability of sentience of an animal or digital system shares some of the issues of asking about the probability that an object is hot. People have different concepts about what “hot” means, and they do not depend just on temperature (for example, the minimum temperature for hot wood is higher than the minimum temperature for hot metal because this transfers heat more efficiently). I understand sentience as having subjective experiences whose intensity is not exactly 0. However, I suspect some people understand it as having subjective experiences which are sufficiently intense. Different bars for this will lead to different probabilities. Asking about the distribution of the intensity of subjective experiences mitigates this. For example, one could ask about the probability of the mean intensity of what an LLM experienced writing a message exceeding the mean intensity of human experiences. It still seems super hard to get numbers for this, but what they refer to may be more concrete than a vague concept like sentience.
I do not see how philosophical zombies (p-zombies) could be physically possible. If they were just like humans at a fundamental physical level, they would in fact be humans. So they would be as conscious as humans, which I assume are conscious (because I am a conscious human right now, and other humans do not seem relevantly different).
I endorse the temperature approach. I’m not sure illusionists would accept the question “What’s the % probability that an entity is conscious?” as meaningful but maybe a similar question could indeed be universally accepted, like “Compared to your pain intensity 1 (being poked by a needle), what’s your central estimate for the intensity of suffering experienced in scenario X?”
Just to clarify, my argument didn’t concern classical p-zombies but what I call “honest p-zombies”—intelligent humanoid entities capable of metacognition but without any intuition similar to our phenomenal intuitions.
Relatedly, I liked the post Costs of Embodiment.